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Making Refugees Work? The Politics of Integrating Syrian Refugees into the Labor Market in Jordan
Katharina Lenner & Lewis Turner
To cite this article: Katharina Lenner & Lewis Turner (2018): Making Refugees Work? The Politics of Integrating Syrian Refugees into the Labor Market in Jordan, Middle East Critique, DOI:
10.1080/19436149.2018.1462601
To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/19436149.2018.1462601
© 2018 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
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Making Refugees Work? The Politics of Integrating Syrian Refugees into the Labor Market in Jordan
KATHARINA LENNERa & LEWIS TURNERb
aDepartment of Social and Policy Sciences, University of Bath, UK
bDepartment of Politics and International Studies, SOAS University of London, UK
AbstrAct Refugee response planners no longer frame Syrian refugees merely as objects of humanitarian care. Increasingly they are portrayed as enterprising subjects, whose formal integration into labor markets simultaneously can create self-sufficient actors and cure the economic woes of host countries.
However, bringing together humanitarian and economic agendas is not an easy task. This article analyzes the contradictions and frictions that have emerged in the process of implementing the Jordan Compact, a political commitment to integrate Syrian refugees into the formal Jordanian labor market, and which is supposed to showcase such win-win strategies. It argues that the Jordan Compact should be seen as a policy model that has achieved enough consensus and incorporated enough disparate objectives to be labelled a ‘policy success.’ Yet, central actors have neglected core features of Jordan’s political economy and labor market, and/or the lives and survival strategies of refugees, such that their radical blueprints of transformation have been disrupted. Despite the widespread commitment to the scheme, it is thus unlikely that the Jordan Compact will both reinvigorate the Jordanian economy and offer Syrians the prospect of a dignified, self-sufficient life, an important lesson for comparable schemes being rolled out across the globe.
Key Words: Forced migration; Governance; Informality; Labor markets; Jordan; Middle East studies; Neoliberalism; Policy mobilities; Special economic zones; Syrian refugees
More than five years have passed since Syrians began to escape en masse to neighboring countries to seek refuge from violent conflict. While their presence primarily was dealt with in the first years through ‘classic’ international interventions that viewed Syrian refugees as objects of humanitarian care and assistance, there has been a notable change in tack since 2014. Western donors as well as international organizations have started pushing for the crisis response to be more development-oriented, aiming to make Syrian refugees more
‘self-reliant’ or ‘resilient,’ and thus less dependent on international assistance.
The Jordan Compact represents a milestone in this process. In the Jordan Compact, issued at the conclusion of the London donors conference for Syria and the region in February 2016,
© 2018 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.
org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Correspondence Address: Katharina Lenner, Department of Social and Policy Sciences, University of Bath, Bath BA2 7AY, UK. Email: k.lenner@bath.ac.uk. Lewis Turner, Department of Politics and International Studies, SOAS University of London, Thornhaugh Street, Russell Square, London WC1H 0XG, UK. Email: lewis_turner@soas.ac.uk
the Government of Jordan (GoJ) declared that in the coming years it would allow poten- tially as many as 200,000 Syrians to obtain work permits in Jordan. Syrians’ formal labor market participation rapidly transformed from being a taboo topic into the new benchmark by which the government now would be held accountable by the international community and their donors. Not only that, but government representatives, donors, and humanitarian actors have presented these changes as a ‘paradigm shift’ in terms of how host states across the world could cope with large and protracted refugee situations.
‘Turning the Syrian refugee crisis into a development opportunity’ has become the new collective mantra, and Jordan has become the showcase of this projected ‘win-win’ solution.
The possibility of socioeconomic integration for Syrians in Jordan regularly is presented, especially by international advisers, as the means simultaneously to alleviate Syrians’ eco- nomic woes and to reinvigorate (but also reduce) international support for Jordan by boosting its economy overall, and to reduce the numbers of Syrians opting to make the journey to Europe. Yet as this article shows, this policy model not only is problematic as such but also proven to be much more complicated than its designers’ depictions.
In order to demonstrate the significance and pitfalls of these supposedly fundamental policy changes in how refugees are governed, the article draws on academic discussions on humanitarian, refugee and development policies, as well as those on neoliberal reforms in Jordan and their effects on its labor market. In analyzing the main strategies pursued to implement this blueprint, the article teases out the political dynamics that have become apparent in the Jordan Compact’s realization, and the main points of friction that have emerged. We argue that in an attempt to build a policy model that elicits enough consensus to be ‘implementable,’ and to achieve a variety of disparate objectives, long-standing features of political economy in Jordan have been under-appreciated by most of the actors involved in designing the scheme, many of whom lack experience with (Jordanian) labor market issues, and/or with the lives and survival strategies of (Syrian) refugees. Specifically, in its unfolding, the Jordan Compact has run up against three main underlying dynamics that have shaped Jordan’s political economy for decades: (a) zonal development strategies, which have been a central but highly problematic feature of growth strategies in the country, (b) a nationally-segmented labor market that builds on specialized, precarious migrant labor, and (c) the relevance of informal labor and the political creation of informality. We argue that these three dynamics disrupt radical blueprints of transformation in ways largely unforeseen by their proponents, and already are starting to highlight the fundamental shortcomings of the initial compromise. Taken together, they will make it extremely difficult to square the circle of giving Syrians in the country the prospect of a dignified, self-sufficient life, while simultaneously making the Jordanian economic desert bloom.
To unfold this argument, this article begins by drawing on ethnographic literatures from the fields of development and humanitarianism to offer an analysis of policy models such as the Jordan Compact as compromises with inbuilt limitations and outlines the main features of the Compact and the Syrian refugee population in Jordan from this perspective. It then gives an overview of the Jordanian labor market, which provides an essential background to understanding how the attempts to implement the Compact have evolved. Subsequently, it examines the different strategies that are being pursued formally to integrate Syrian refugees into the labor market. Firstly, it analyzes attempts to expand investments, and thereby jobs for both Syrians and Jordanians, mainly in export-intensive industries in a number of Special Economic Zones. Secondly, it explores the difficulties experienced with efforts to substitute Syrian refugees for other migrant workers, with a specific focus on a high-profile garment industry pilot. Thirdly, the article turns to the informal labor market, where policy-makers
hope for the formalization of existing Syrian labor in sectors such as construction and agricul- ture.1 In all three instances, we argue that, despite the high-profile alliances that have pushed to turn policy blueprints into reality, the defining features of the Jordanian labor market and political economy, which have developed over decades, have substantially complicated their realization. Our argument is based on 60 semi-structured interviews and numerous infor- mal conversations conducted jointly or individually with staff of key agencies involved in these attempted policy shifts, as well as with Syrian refugees in Jordan, between June and November 2015, April and August 2016, and April and May 2017, and on an analysis of relevant policy documents and media reporting over the course of 2016/17.
The Jordan Compact: Making of a Global Policy Model and its (Syrian Refugee) Target Group
The Jordan Compact marks not only a shift in globalized thinking about solutions for pro- tracted refugee situations but also a remarkable compromise. It has mobilized a range of actors, agencies, and agendas, and tied them together in a joint project. Such convergences can be created, as authors like David Mosse have argued, by a shared desire to create development policy successes and generalizable, global policy models. Yet these policy models tend to be reliant on their relative detachment from the complex realities upon which they are supposed to act. Different agencies enter into such policies or projects if they can (re)interpret them to fit their specific agenda, yet the different, and often conflicting, interpre- tations that circulate are either the source of, or point to, unresolved conflicts and frictions.2 This disjuncture between plans and realities on the ground is an established subject of critical writing in analyses of development policies and projects. Scholars have analyzed the many ways in which communities of experts, (self-)mandated as trustees, misunderstand, explain away or simply ignore the complex realities of the populations and territories they are supposed to ‘improve’, and the effects these complexities have on the trajectories of such interventions and their target groups.3 This is also the case for humanitarian work- ers and humanitarian interventions, which often are characterized by a particularly strong detachment from the displaced populations that are nominally the object of their care.4 The dynamics that create and maintain the networks of actors and agencies required for such projects of improvement are somewhat less commonly in focus within this literature, but
1 For reasons of space, this article does not discuss Cash for Work (CfW) initiatives, which have constituted an important activity for those actors, particularly many international NGOs, seeking to work on refugee liveli- hoods. CfW schemes have been operating in many of Jordan’s Syrian refugee camps since their establishment, but more recently these activities have been rolled out to non-camp spaces as well. Due to their relatively short-term scope, they were initially not relevant to discussions on work permits. However, since the spring of 2017, increasing attempts have been made to translate CfW-based forms of employment into work permits.
2 David Mosse (2004) Is Good Policy Unimplementable? Reflections on the Ethnography of Aid Policy and Practice, Development and Change, 35(4), pp. 639–671; see also David Lewis & D. Mosse (eds) (2006) Development Brokers and Translators. The Ethnography of Aid and Agencies (Bloomfield: Kumarian Press).
3 See i.e., James Ferguson (1994) The Anti-Politics Machine: Development, Depoliticization and Bureaucratic Power in Lesotho (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press); Mark Hobart (ed) (1993) An Anthropological Critique of Development: The Growth of Ignorance (London: Routledge); and Tania M. Li (2007) The Will to Improve: Governmentality, Development, and the Practice of Politics (Durham, NC: Duke University Press).
4 Michel Agier (2010) Humanity as an Identity and its Political Effects (A Note on Camps and Humanitarian Government), Humanity, 1(1), pp. 29–45; Barbara Harrell-Bond (2002) Can Humanitarian Work with Refugees Be Humane? Human Rights Quarterly, 24(1), pp. 51–85; Jennifer Hyndman (2000) Managing Displacement:
Refugees and the Politics of Humanitarianism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press).
have been highlighted by various authors who ethnographically analyze processes of making and implementing policy in different fields.5
The Jordan Compact illustrates these very dynamics—both the coming together of diver- gent actors to form an ostensibly shared set of goals, and the remoteness of their compromise from the realities on the ground. Marking this particular context has been the coming together of two fields of expertise that were not so strongly integrated in the recent past.6 The search for solutions for protracted refugee populations in countries of first asylum has prompted forced migration experts, humanitarian organizations, NGOs and governmental actors to move their focus (once more) from ‘traditional’ humanitarian work toward labor market interventions. Simultaneously, economic planners, labor market experts, and businesses have had to integrate refugees into their conceptual and practical horizons. As we explore below, this, on the one hand, has created new relationships and alliances. On the other hand, this coming together of agendas and actors has revealed a number of unresolved inconsistencies, frictions and exclusions that have haunted the project since its inception. These have resulted from the structuring dynamics of the Jordanian labor market and the strategies and priorities of Syrian refugees, as well as their neglect by many of the actors involved.
At first glance the key stakeholders—including the GoJ, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and its partners, and international donors—have made notable strides in terms of implementing the Compact. There are about 320,000 reg- istered adult Syrian refugees in Jordan, and between the start of 2016 and early May 2017, almost 51,000 annual work permits had been issued to them,7 although slightly fewer than 40,000 of those permits were valid in May 2017.8 In part, this progress was due to the GoJ providing a grace period for formalizing the status of Syrian workers, in which there were no work permit fees for employers, no fines for not having previously applied for work permits, and during which Syrians found working informally would not be sent to camps.
International donors matched Jordan’s commitment; most notably, the World Bank endorsed a plan to facilitate access to up to $1.4 billion of credit at rates typically only available to lower-income countries and signed a $300 million, 35-year loan in the months following the Jordan Compact.9 Numerous other donors are supporting different schemes intended to increase Syrians’ labor market participation and the numbers of work permits issued. Funding
5 See i.e., John Clarke, Dave Bainton, Noémi Lendvai & Paul Stubbs (2015) Making Policy Move: Towards a Politics of Translation and Assemblage (Bristol: Policy Press); Frank Fischer (2003) Reframing Public Policy:
Discursive Politics and Deliberative Practices (Oxford: OUP).
6 It should be noted that the focus on refugee livelihoods is, in and of itself, far from new. Both in Jordan and other contexts this has, at various times, been a focus of humanitarian agencies. See Jeff Crisp (2003) United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), Refugee Livelihoods and Self-Reliance: A Brief History. Available at:
http://www.unhcr.org/, accessed July 11, 2017; Sari Hanafi, Leila Hilal & Lex Takkenberg (eds) (2014) UNRWA and Palestinian Refugees: From Relief and Works to Human Development (Abingdon: Routledge).
7 Maha Kattaa (2017) ILO’s Support to the Formalization of Syrian Refugees in the Labour Market in Jordan, May (Amman: International Labor Organization [ILO]).
8 See LWG (2017) Livelihood Working Group, Amman, Jordan. Minutes of Meeting, 09.05.2017. Available at:
http://data.unhcr.org/syrianrefugees/country.php?id=107, accessed July 11, 2017. While it had been widely assumed among humanitarian actors that the work permit target would mean how many Syrians are working simultaneously, the GoJ was arguing in spring 2017 that each annual work permit given since the beginning of 2016 should cumulatively count, even if more than one permit had been issued to the same individual.
Author Interview with Project Management Unit (PMU) Representatives, Ministry of Planning and International Cooperation (MoPIC), Amman, May 2017.
9 Jordan Times (2016a) World Bank approves $300 million loan to Jordan, Sept 28. Available at:
http://www.jordantimes.com, accessed January 3, 2017.
levels increased significantly after the Jordan Compact, even though there has been a slump in the funding of the Jordan Response Plan (JRP) in 2017.10
This progress might not have been expected. As one of the most important Western allies in the region, it often has been sufficient for Jordanian governmental actors to declare their commitment to a variety of donor-sponsored ‘development opportunities’ in order to get much-needed funding, without necessarily following through with plans that donors envis- aged.11 This is even more noteworthy given the sensitivity of the subject: until the negotiations that culminated in the Jordan Compact, GoJ authorities were loath to imply publicly, through words or actions, that Syrians may be another (semi-)permanent refugee population, in a country in which the divisions between populations of Palestinian and ‘East Bank’ ances- try are an important political fault line.12 This included restricting Syrians’ access to the formal labor market, attempting to keep camp spaces appearing temporary, and restricting non-governmental organization (NGO) programming on work and livelihoods, such that even ‘vocational training’ was deemed too politically sensitive a phrase to use.13 Following through with the Compact’s main stipulation to provide Syrians with work permits is thus a notable change. At the same time, a number of inconsistencies become visible as soon as one takes a closer look at the Compact’s aims and its practical limitations.
Cracks begin to show when asking even very basic questions, such as who does the target group actually comprise. Of particular note is the vexing question of how many working age Syrians reside in Jordan, and thus how many work permits might plausibly be given or wanted. As of the summer of 2017, according to UNHCR, there are approximately 660,000 registered Syrian refugees in Jordan, a number that has increased only very slightly since the Compact was issued. Of these 660,000, approximately 150,000 are registered camp res- idents, while the rest are registered as living in Jordan’s cities, towns, villages and farmland.
In contrast, the Jordanian census of December 2015 reported that there were just over 1.25 million Syrians (refugees and non-refugees) residing in the country. This census number has been treated with strong skepticism in the humanitarian sector, in particular considering the controversy that surrounded the allegedly inflated numbers of Iraqis in Jordan in 2007.14
10 The Jordan Response Plan (JRP) was established in 2014 as a government-led response plan to the Syrian refugee presence, and as part of the GoJ’s ongoing efforts to refocus the response to target Jordanian host communities more strongly. It was 62 percent funded in 2016, compared to only 33 percent in 2015. At the end of May 2017, the JRP was less than 8 percent funded. The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (UNOCHA)’s Inter-Agency Financial Tracking Service, which only includes the refugee component, reported that in 2016, 94 percent of the total requested funds were received, which is an exception- ally high number. In the first quarter of 2017, 29 percent of the total requested funds were received: see MoPIC (n.d.) Jordan Response Platform for the Syria Crisis. Available at: http://www.jrpsc.org, accessed August 6, 2017; UNOCHA (2017) Inter-Agency Financial Tracking-Jordan Jan-Dec 2016. Available at: http://data.unhcr.
org/syrianrefugees/country.php?id=107, accessed August 6, 2017.
11 See i.e., Jane Harrigan, Hamed El-Said & Chengang Wang (2006) The IMF and the World Bank in Jordan:
A Case of Over Optimism and Elusive Growth, Review of International Organizations, 1(3), pp. 263–292.
12 Oroub El-Abed (2014) The Discourse of Guesthood: Forced Migrants in Jordan, in Anita Fábos and Riina Isotalo (eds) Managing Muslim Mobilities (London: Palgrave Macmillan), pp. 81–100.
13 Author Interviews with ILO livelihoods specialist, Amman, November 2015; Andrew Harper, UNHCR Jordan Country Representative, Amman, August 2015; see also Lewis Turner (2015) Explaining the (Non-)Encampment of Syrian Refugees: Security, Class and the Labour Market in Lebanon and Jordan, Mediterranean Politics, 20(3), pp. 386–404.
14 See Katharina Lenner (2016) Blasts From the Past: Policy Legacies and Policy Memories in the Making of the Jordanian Response to the Syrian Refugee Crisis, EUI Working Papers, MWP Red Number Series, 32 (Florence: EUI), pp. 10–15.
The question of how many Syrian refugees live in Jordan has an obvious bearing on the viability of the 200,000 target. Slightly over half of registered Syrians in Jordan are under 18, and therefore ineligible for work permits; further, in the occupational data that UNHCR holds on approximately 290,000 camp and non-camp Syrians aged between 18 and 65, over 100,000 are housewives, and many thousands may be physically or mentally unable to work. Camp residents, who are more than 20 percent of registered Syrian refugees in the country, also have experienced difficulties in accessing work permits. This is despite initially being, at least implicitly, one of the main targets for the work permits scheme.
Different actors involved in governing Syrian refugees, including the Ministries of Interior, Labor, and Planning, have to some extent contrasting agendas, which variously emphasize control over the entry and exit of people and goods into and out of camps, or the economic integration of Syrian refugees. These divergent agendas have led some officials to attempt to disrupt the process of granting camp residents work permits.
Even for those Syrians in Jordan who are willing and able to work,15 obtaining a work permit is far from straightforward. Characterized as ‘the work permit maze,’16 the process of obtaining a work permit can include reclaiming confiscated documents, applying for a Ministry of Interior (MoI) service card (which in late April 2017 only just over 200,000 non-camp Syrian adults held),17 a security check, obtaining a rental contract or an address statement from UNHCR, and paying fees for administration and for health certificates, fees that are applied inconsistently across labor directorates.18 Some Syrians living in urban areas are unable to obtain an MoI card because they left the Za’tari refugee camp after a particular date without the requisite paperwork, making them ineligible for an MoI card, and thus also for a work permit.19
Another consequence of who was brought to the table and the compromise they made has been the exclusion of non-Syrian refugee populations from the Compact. These include the approximately 63,000 registered Iraqi, 8,000 Yemeni, and 3,500 Sudanese refugees.20 Given their relatively small numbers in relation to Syrians, it should be relatively easy to facilitate access to the labor market for other registered refugee populations as well.21 However, the strong prioritization of Syrian refugees in recent donor-Jordan relations, the lack of advocacy
15 An ILO report estimates that in the spring of 2017, around 85,000 Syrian refugees were working formally or informally. ILO (2017) Work Permits and Employment of Syrian Refugees in Jordan: Towards Formalising the Work of Syrian Refugees (Amman: ILO), p. 30.
16 Jordan INGO Forum (JIF) (2016) The Work Permit Maze. Available at: https://data2.unhcr.org/en/documents/, accessed July 11, 2017.
17 Urban Verification Updates as of April 30, 2017, personal communication through UNHCR, May 2017. The GoJ does not provide figures of the number of MoI cards disaggregated by age but provided a total figure of 418,063. The estimate above is based on the assumption that the distribution of MoI cards would, in terms of age, reflect the overall demographics of the Syrian refugee population in Jordan.
18 Livelihood Working Group (LWG) (2016) Livelihood Working Group, Amman, Jordan. Minutes of Meeting, 16.6.2016. Available at: http://data.unhcr.org/syrianrefugees/country.php?id=107, accessed July 31, 2016. The requirement for an additional health certificate, which came with additional fees, was finally waived in September 2016, but that does not prevent new hidden fees from being charged in the future, perhaps especially when less donor and agency attention is focused on work permit questions.
19 See Luigi Achilli (2015) Syrian Refugees in Jordan: A Reality Check, MPC Policy Brief, 2015/2 (Florence:
EUI/MPC). There are no official figures for this group. Informal estimates from humanitarian agency workers range between a few thousand and tens of thousands.
20 UNHCR (2017) Jordan – UNHCR Jordan Overview, May 2017. Available at: http://data.unhcr.org/syrianref- ugees/country.php?id=107, accessed July 9, 2017.
21 Arab Renaissance for Democracy and Development (ARDD) (2016) Accessing the Labor Market for Syrian Refugees: Lessons Learnt From the Iraqi Refugee Crisis (Amman: ARDD), p. 9.
on behalf of non-Syrian refugees in Jordan, and humanitarian agencies’ focus on problems that are deemed both pressing and solvable, at the expense of thornier and/or seemingly unimportant questions, prevented the inclusion of non-Syrian refugees.22 While these factors limit the number of refugees who plausibly could access work permits, this is far from an exhaustive explanation for why attempts to implement the Jordan Compact have faltered. In these attempts, the stakeholders of the Compact have confronted a reality more complex than the one sketched out in their blueprint for transformation, particularly in terms of Jordan’s labor market. This process has revealed the divergent interests and agendas that underlay ostensibly shared objectives.
Jordan’s Labor Market after 20 Years of Neoliberal Transformation
The inconsistencies, frictions and exclusions that have complicated the implementation of the Jordan Compact must be understood in the context of the broader dynamics that characterize Jordan’s political economy and labor market after more than 20 years of neoliberalizations.
The Compact resembles these broader strategies of transformation. At the same time, it can- not overcome the contradictions and structuring dynamics of the labor market, which in part are caused by, but also have disrupted, different neoliberalizations. Like the Jordan Compact, many of the (attempted) transformations of Jordan’s political economy have relied on pol- icies and rationalities that purport to solve countries’ socioeconomic challenges through globally-circulating neoliberal solutions, which seek to increase the ‘market orientation’
of economies and societies, reinforce free trade and minimize government intervention, while curbing public spending, especially on social issues. Long evident in the country’s relationship with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and its repeated implementation of structural adjustment policies,23 this approach has been embraced and spurred on by a new generation of technocrats who became increasingly powerful upon Abdullah II’s coronation as King of Jordan in 1999, and other major international donors have supported it.
These rationalities have fueled the reorganization of space to suit the interests of capital through the creation of development corridors, special economic zones, and other spaces of exception.24 Zonal development technically has been pursued since the 1970s, when a number of Free Trade Zones were created, although it only really took off with the establishment of Qualifying Industrial Zones in the mid-1990s, followed by the Aqaba Special Economic Zone Authority (ASEZA) in 2000, and a number of Special Economic Zones since 2008.
To its promoters, zonal development is a vital element of the vision to turn the country into a regional investment hub, elevate the role of the private sector, and integrate Jordan more firmly into a truly globalized economy.25 Accompanying such macroeconomic strategies have been various attempts to foster entrepreneurialism and self-reliance, e.g., through microcre- dit programs targeting different social groups as well as various (community) development
22 Author Interview with European donor agency official, Amman, April 2016.
23 Lamis Andoni and Jillian Schwedler (1996) Bread Riots in Jordan, Middle East Report, 201, pp. 40–42; Anne M. Baylouny (2008) Militarizing Welfare: Neo-Liberalism and Jordanian Policy, Middle East Journal, 62(2), pp. 277–303; J. Harrigan et al., The IMF; Karen Pfeifer (1999) How Tunisia, Morocco, Jordan and even Egypt became IMF ‘Success Stories’ in the 1990s, Middle East Report, 210, pp. 23–27.
24 See i.e., Shamel Azmeh (2014) Labor in Global Production Networks: Workers in the Qualifying Industrial Zones (QIZs) of Egypt and Jordan, Global Networks, 14(4), pp. 495–513; Pascal Debruyne (2013) Spatial Rearticulations of Statehood: Jordan’s Geographies of Power under Globalization, PhD thesis, Ghent University;
Christopher Parker (2009) Tunnel Bypasses and Minarets of Capitalism: Amman as Neoliberal Assemblage, Political Geography, 28(2), pp. 110–120.
25 See P. Debruyne, Spatial Rearticulations, pp. 118–162.
projects in urban and rural spaces,26 the ostensible aim of which has been to get Jordanians out of a supposedly outdated orientation toward public sector employment, enhance ‘human capital development,’ and create better ‘fits’ with the labor market. While such initiatives have transformed conceptions and spaces of the political,27 their successes—as defined by their own goals—have been questionable. Public sector employment remains crucial and desirable to many Jordanians, and microenterprise projects remain fraught with contradic- tions that are relatively apparent to their participants.28 Most of the special economic zones not only have been relatively unsuccessful in attracting investment but also they have failed to create positive spillover effects on local economies and labor markets. This is not least due to an over-reliance on migrant labor.29
While large-scale labor migration, both to and from Jordan, preceded the rise of these projects to neoliberalize Jordan’s political economy, it has since become embedded in these attempted transformations. In the context of the oil boom in the 1970s, many Jordanian citizens sought opportunities in the oil-producing states of the Gulf. The remittances from this employment fueled a demand for services and investments in infrastructure, which in turn dramatically increased the number of migrant workers in Jordan, particularly from Egypt and South East Asia.30 These trends, which continue to this day, reinforced the need for migrant labor to do many of the low-skilled jobs that the Jordanian labor market in fact offers—for example in sectors such as agriculture, construction, the service sector, and domestic labor. More recently, labor market reforms have focused on reducing the cost of labor and increasing labor market ‘flexibility.’31 This has been achieved both through the use of migrant labor, and its spatial segregation into economic zones. The garment sector, one of the areas discussed in this article, provides a particularly striking example of this trend.
The sector has a quota that allows up to 75 percent of its workforce to be non-Jordanian.
This extensive use of migrant labor, and the specific labor regime to which workers are subjected, is a key factor in the success of the garment industry, which is one of Jordan’s most significant export sectors. This labor regime, helped by various exceptions from the labor law, exploits the isolation of migrant workers from their surroundings, increases their availability to work longer and harder, and thereby enables factories to respond to the ever-increasing pressure on suppliers for on-time delivery and shorter production times in
26 See i.e., Myriam Ababsa & Rami F. Daher (eds) (2011) Villes, pratiques urbaines et construction nationale en Jordanie (Beirut: Presses de l’Ifpo); K. Lenner (2015) Projects of Improvement, Continuities of Neglect:
Re-Fragmenting the Periphery in Southern Rural Jordan, Middle East – Topics & Arguments, 5, pp. 77–88;
Mayssoun Sukarieh (2016) On Class, Culture, and the Creation of the Neoliberal Subject: The Case of Jordan, Anthropological Quarterly, 89(4), pp. 1201–1225.
27 See i.e., Sami Zemni & Koenraad Bogaert (2009) Trade, Security and Neoliberal Politics: Whither Arab Reform?
Evidence from the Moroccan Case, The Journal of North African Studies, 14(1), pp. 91–107.
28 M. Sukarieh, On Class; K. Lenner, Projects of Improvement; Ragui Assaad (2014) The Structure and Evolution of Employment in Jordan, in: R. Assaad (ed) The Jordanian Labour Market in the New Millennium (Oxford:
Oxford University Press), pp. 34–35.
29 See Myrthe Toppen, Wael Abu Anzeh & Alistair Shawcross (2017) Work Opportunities for Syrians: An Analysis of Special Economic Zones as Vehicles for Economic Growth and Job Creation in Jordan (Amman: Legatum Institute & Identity Center). As indicated below, the garments sector constitutes an exception to the first point, as it has attracted a significant number of foreign companies. The second point, however, is particularly relevant.
30 Françoise de Bel-Air (2016) Migration Profile: Jordan. MPC Policy Brief, 2016/06 (Florence: EUI/MPC);
Geraldine Chatelard (2010) Jordan: A Refugee Haven, Migration Policy Institute. Available at: www.migra- tionpolicy.org, accessed May 15, 2015.
31 MoPIC (2011) Jordan’s National Employment Strategy 2011–2020 (Amman: Ministry of Planning and International Cooperation); for these trends regionally see Adam Hanieh (2013) Lineages of Revolt: Issues of Contemporary Capitalism in the Middle East (Chicago: Haymarket).
the global garment industry. With its reliance on the free availability of such dis-embedded workers, this regime has become the cornerstone of garment production in Jordan’s Industrial Estates, formerly designated as QIZs.32
Another way in which labor market ‘flexibility’ in Jordan has been produced and rein- forced is informality and the non-enforcement of regulations. Although structural adjustment policies in Jordan did not lead to the same degree of informalization of labor as elsewhere in the Global South,33 a 2013 United Nations Development Program (UNDP) study reported that informal employment accounts for 44 percent of all private sector employment in Jordan.34 Its scope presumably further has increased since that time, in part due to Syrian (and other) refugees entering the labor market. Many migrant laborers working in the informal economy either do not have work permits or are working outside the sector for which they originally were granted a permit.35 This form of (non-)regulation of migrant labor, which allows migrants into the country but only partly formalizes their status, constitutes a vital part of neoliberal forms of governance, in that it allows for further deregulation of labor markets, and creates downward pressure on wages. While not necessarily an intentional, top-down strategy controlled by political decision-makers, it becomes effective though a myriad of individual actors pursuing strategies (on a local level) that are politically tolerated or facilitated.36 In Jordan as elsewhere, illegalization and the non-enforcement of labor market regulations have benefitted employers, who profit from a labor force that is made vulnera- ble to exploitation and that tends not to claim its labor rights.37 As a result of these broader developments, the Jordanian labor market is characterized by a high degree of segmentation between the public and private sectors, formal and informal economies, genders, Jordanian nationals and migrant workers,38 and also between different nationalities of migrant labor.
Different nationalities are (formally or informally) recruited in accordance with particular skills ascribed to them, which supposedly qualify them for work in specific sectors.
32 Factories in these estates, which used to be designated, and are still often referred to as, Qualifying Industrial Zones (QIZs), produce exclusively for the US market under the Jordan-US Free Trade Agreement (FTA), and pay only a 5 percent income tax and no export taxes, while having to ensure that 35 percent of the value of exported goods is composed of local content. The origins of the scheme were tied to the Jordanian-Israeli peace agreement in 1994, and the QIZ regulations used to require a minimum of 8.5 percent of components to come from Israel. These regulations were superseded in 2010 by the US-Jordan FTA, which lifted the need for an Israeli component. See Azmeh, ‘Labor’; Bashar al-Khatib, Aya Samara, W. Abu Anzeh, M. Toppen & Annie Hamill et al. (2016) Re-Thinking Investment in Jordan (Amman: Adam Smith Institute & Identity Centre).
33 Assaad, ‘Structure and Evolution’, pp. 13–15. Rather than complete informalization, the Jordanian formal private sector has created many jobs with short-term contracts, and the period has thus witnessed a good degree of labor precarization.
34 UNDP et al. (2013) The Informal Sector in the Jordanian Economy (Amman: UNDP, SEC, AECID & MoPIC), p. 32. Assaad estimates that informal employment even made up 55 percent of non-government employment in 2010, cf. Assaad, ‘Structure and Evolution’, p. 34.
35 A recent ILO report estimates that the percentage of non-Jordanian workers in the country that have a work permit that reflects their actual occupation is no more than 17 percent. Susan Razzaz (2017) A Challenging Market Becomes More Challenging. Jordanian Workers, Migrant Workers and Refugees in the Jordanian Labour Market (Beirut: ILO), p.12.
36 Nancy Hiemstra (2010) Immigrant ‘Illegality’ as Neoliberal Governmentality in Leadville, Colorado, Antipode, 42(1), pp. 74–102; Carl-Ulrik Schierup, Aleksandra Ålund & Branka Likić-Brborić (2015) Migration, Precarization and the Democratic Deficit in Global Governance, International Migration, 53(3), pp. 50–63.
37 Rebecca Harris (2015) Transforming Refugees into ‘Illegal Immigrants’: Neoliberalism, Domestic Politics, and Syrian Refugee Employment in Jordan, BA thesis, Brown University; pp. 41–43; Mauro van Aken (2005) Values at Work: A Case of Labourers in Agribusiness (Jordan), REMMM, 105/106, pp. 119–122.
38 F. de Bel-Air (2007): State Policies on Migration and Refugees in Jordan. Available at: http://schools.aucegypt.
edu, accessed August 7, 2017.
Yet these neoliberalizations should not be conceived of as proceeding in smooth and homogenous ways. As a new generation of literature has demonstrated, such forms of gov- ernance are uneven and variegated.39 In Aihwa Ong’s terms, neoliberal reforms bring mar- ket-driven calculations ‘in the management of populations and the administration of special spaces,’40 but ‘exceptions to neoliberalism are also invoked, in political decision, to exclude populations and places from neoliberal calculations and choices.’41 Such exceptions can be understood as a way to appease important constituencies or, more abstractly, as articulations with alternative, residual or currently marginalized projects, which inscribe themselves into dominant political economic strategies.42 One way in which such exceptions are evident in the Jordanian labor market is through the existence of ‘closed sectors.’ There are at least 17 job types or sectors, including engineering, teaching, medicine and many service sector jobs, that are formally closed to non-Jordanians, even though many non-Jordanians work in these sectors informally, and there is even some unclarity about exactly which sectors are ‘closed.’43 This exception to the neoliberal logics that drive the use of migrant labor in Jordan protects the interests of a domestic constituency, whose protestations about reduced public sector employment opportunities and high unemployment dovetail with a narrative that there are ‘too many’ labor migrants in the country, and that these migrants are competing with Jordanians for jobs.44
The current attempt to integrate refugees into the labor market should be read as another rendering of these attempted transformations. Jordan is once again a laboratory for sweeping changes, but this time Syrian refugees have been singled out as the population that can rein- vigorate Jordan’s economy. Rather than being objects of humanitarian care and maintenance, Syrian refugees are framed as unused human capital, which can be made productive as a new category of migrant workers and help Jordan to overcome the long-standing deficiencies of its production regime. At the same time, attempts to preserve the aforementioned exceptions to neoliberalism remain apparent, particularly in the GoJ’s staunch refusal to contemplate opening up the closed sectors—even though such a move could substantially increase the numbers of work permits issued to Syrians.45
Given the Compact’s articulation with these previous strategies of transformation, it is unsurprising that, in its implementation, it has encountered many of the same stubborn and persistent challenges facing previous attempts to restructure Jordan’s political economy and labor market. The Compact particularly has run up against the problems inherent to attempts to create an export-driven economy through zonal development, the consequences of a nationally-segmented labor market and the regimes of control it relies on, and the country’s informalized economy. This becomes apparent when analyzing the key strategies pursued to formally integrate Syrian refugees into the labor market.
39 Jamie Peck & Adam Tickell (2002) Neoliberalizing Space, Antipode, 34(3), pp. 380–404; Aihwa Ong (2006) Neoliberalism as Exception: Mutations in Citizenship and Sovereignty (Durham, NC: Duke UP).
40 Ong, Neoliberalism, pp. 3–4.
41 Ibid, p. 4; for Jordan, see José C. Martínez (2017) Leavening Neoliberalization’s Uneven Pathways: Bread, Governance and Political Rationalities in the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, Mediterranean Politics, 22(4), pp. 464–483.
42 J. Clarke (2008) Living With/in and Without Neo-liberalism, Focaal, 51, pp. 135–147.
43 ILO, Work Permits, p. 20; and De Bel-Air, State Policies, pp. 5–6.
44 Such positions have become particularly articulate since the protests that erupted around 2010 and have been voiced by associations like the Retired Army Generals’ Association, the newly created Teachers Union, or the General Union of Workers in the Public Service.
45 ILO, Work Permits, pp. 20–22.
Changing the Rules of Origin, or Special Economic Zones revisited
At the center of the policy instruments sketched out in the Jordan Compact was a renewed focus on Jordan’s Special Economic Zones (SEZs)46 as drivers of increased manufacturing production, combined with the renegotiation of EU-Jordan trade relations. Much like the Compact overall, this component signals the successful integration of the agendas of a wide range of actors and institutions. Yet, it has not been able to produce the promised rewards, or to overcome the underlying problems that belie the zonal development model.
The expected reinvigoration of manufacturing through the Compact was based centrally on the EU’s commitment to changing the rules of origin (RoO) that govern the Jordan—EU Association Agreement. Much like elsewhere in the Global South, these RoO largely have prevented significant (Jordanian) exports to the EU by setting a high threshold for the percentage of any exported good that needs to originate in the country in order to qualify for tariff benefits, and by defining ‘origin’ in a narrow sense.47 Given the low percentage of local raw material input in most goods exported from Jordan, these rules have acted more like a trade barrier than a means to facilitate Jordanian exports to the EU.48 Renegotiating them was thus high on the list of Jordanian priorities for the London donors conference.
The subsequent agreement, concluded in July 2016, eased these regulations for a number of designated SEZs, and Jordanian officials celebrated it as a major breakthrough. They declared that it not only would make manufacturing more profitable, facilitating investment and expanded production levels, but also create tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of jobs for Syrians and Jordanians.49
The agreement stipulates that for a period of 10 years, effective immediately, Jordan and the EU temporarily relax the applicable RoO for individual factories located in 18 industrial and development zones across the country, and that employ no less than 15 percent of Syrian labor. From the beginning of the third year, factories will be required to employ a minimum of 25 percent Syrian refugees to qualify for the new rules. These relaxations adopt a wider definition of the types of processing required for non-origin products to obtain originating status, thereby making it easier to export products to the EU for fewer or no duties.50 The
46 These zones come under a variety of designations, with differing legal regulations and regulating institutions.
The most important ones are classified as Development Zones / Areas, Industrial Cities or Estates, Free Zones, and the Aqaba Special Economic Zone (ASEZ) is classified as its own type. Given that the broader literature generally refers to such zones as SEZs, we use it as an umbrella term that encompasses them all. See further Hanieh, Lineages, pp. 56–60.
47 See i.e., Patricia Augier, Michael Gasiorek & Charles Lai-Tong (2004) Rules of Origin and the EU-Med Partnership: The Case of Textiles, World Economy, 27(9), pp. 1449–1473; and Eckart Naumann (2006) Comparing EU Free Trade Agreements: Rules of Origin, InBrief, 61, pp. 1–12 (Maastricht: ECDPM).
48 In 2014, only 4.3 percent of Jordan’s total exports went to EU member states, while most went to the US, Iraq and Saudi Arabia. The volume of exports to the EU (385 million Euros in 2015) is dwarfed by imports from the EU (almost four billion Euros)—a clear indication of the huge inequality in trade levels, and the relative disadvantage on the Jordanian side. See EC (2016) European Union, Trade in Goods with Jordan. European Commission, DG Trade. Available at:
http://trade.ec.europa.eu/, accessed January 10, 2017; and Jordan Strategy Forum (JSF) (2016) Relaxing the Rules of Origin for Jordanian Industries: A Necessary Step Towards Expanding Jordanian Exports (Amman:
JSF).
49 Author Interviews with Ahmad Awad, Director of Phenix Center for Economic and Informatics Studies, Amman, May 2016; and Ministry of Labor middle manager, Amman, May 2016; see also Karin Laub & Khetam Malkawi (2016) Jordan Test Ground for Large Jobs Program for Syria Refugees, AP, March 4; available at:
http://www.usnews.com, accessed January 10, 2017.
50 EU (2016) Decision No 1/2016 of the EU-Jordan Association Committee of 19 July 2016, Official Journal of the European Union, L233/6, 30.8.2016. Available at: http://eur-lex.europa.eu/, accessed January 10, 2017.
scheme is supported by a substantial concessionary World Bank loan and a 5-year tailored World Bank project, which particularly focuses on attracting investment, changing labor regulations, and improving Jordan’s investment climate.51
This striking deal marks a convergence of different logics and agendas and has created new alliances between hitherto unconnected actors. It uses Jordan as a laboratory and a showcase for a new global blueprint for economic development in refugee hosting states, thereby attempting to marshal the unused ‘human capital’ of refugees. Driven by donor pressure to bring down aid levels (as well as the desire to find solutions for refugees in their countries of first destination), humanitarian and development actors, for some time, have been thinking about ways to accomplish a shift in this direction.52 Recently, this process has been connected with the idea of employing refugees in spatially contained zones. In an influential proposal, Alexander Betts and Paul Collier, two Oxford University professors who undertook a study tour of Jordan in conjunction with UNHCR, advocate such a fresh approach to refugee ‘integration’ in countries of first reception. The idea is to reconcile refugees’ needs and wishes for self-sustainability with the security concerns of host states and their aversion to long-term integration, by fostering a refugee-driven economy that is removed from the broader labor market, thereby taking pressure off it. Rather than refugees being an economic burden, this zonal economy—a second-tier and temporary form of soci- oeconomic integration—would boost the overall local economy, particularly in export-ori- ented manufacturing. At the same time, formal employment possibilities in neighboring states would provide the incentive for Syrians to stay where they are, rather than attempt the journey to Europe.53
Mediated through the global networks of expertise in which the promoters of this new scheme are embedded,54 the model already has gone global. It has been taken up as a blueprint by the UK government, which recently announced that the scheme, originally developed for Jordan, also will be applied to Ethiopia, where the creation of industrial parks is supposed to create jobs for Eritrean refugees, and in effect stop them from coming to Europe.55 The idea has engaged the imagination of a variety of players who currently are seeking to redefine responses to refugee crises,56 and turned it into a governmental project that claims global validity.
51 World Bank (2016a) Economic Opportunities for Jordanians and Syrian Refugees P4R. Available at: http://
www.projects.worldbank.org, accessed January 10, 2017.
52 See i.e., FMR (2004): Sustainable Livelihoods: Seeds of Success? Forced Migration Review, 20.
53 Alexander Betts & Paul Collier (2015) Help Refugees Help Themselves: Let Displaced Syrians Join the Labor Market. Foreign Affairs, November/December, available at: http://www.foreignaffairs.com, accessed January 10, 2017. These ideas are developed with a more global reach in A. Betts & P. Collier (2017) Refuge: Transforming a Broken Refugee System (London: Allen Lane).
54 To mention but a few, Paul Collier used to work as the World Bank’s Director of the Research Development Department and is currently an advisor to the International Monetary Fund’s Strategies and Policies Department, as well as the Africa Region of the World Bank; he furthermore frequently advises the British government.
Alexander Betts previously worked for UNHCR and has acted as a consultant or advisor to, among others, UNDP, UNICEF, the World Bank, IOM, and the Council of Europe.
55 ICAI (2017) The UK’s Aid Response to Irregular Migration in the Central Mediterranean: A Rapid Review (London: Independent Commission for Aid Impact).
56 Another such organization is Refugee Cities, a US-based NGO that envisions turning refugees from ‘a bur- den into a benefit’ by creating special-status settlements for refugees in which they could work legally, and contribute to the economic development of host states. See Refugee Cities (n.d.) Our Response. Available at:
www.refugeecities.org, accessed August 5, 2017.
Yet these supposedly global schemes always need to mobilize adherents in specific set- tings in order to become meaningful and effective there.57 In Jordan, the WANA Institute, a socioeconomic think-tank, played a decisive role in fleshing out the idea.58 Sponsored by King Abdullah II’s uncle, Prince Hassan bin Talal, and headed by Dr Erica Harper, the wife of the (then) UNHCR country representative for Jordan, the institute’s participation secured crucial royal buy-in, and created a close link with UNHCR, as well as the Oxford professors.59 The scheme also was shaped by the agenda of the proponents of zonal devel- opment, for whom it has provided an occasion to re-create the raison d’etre of economic zones.60
The reinvigoration of zonal development strategies is taking place despite their ques- tionable record worldwide,61 and despite a dispute about their overall benefits to Jordan’s economy and labor market.62 While the Industrial Estates/QIZs and ASEZA have managed to attract substantial investments, this is less the case for the Development Zones, some of which only exist on paper, whereas others have a mixed record at best.63 Yet, with such an array of prominent agencies and individuals as driving forces, ostensibly united around a common set of aims, the idea gained considerable traction. At the same time, the heteroge- neity of their agendas, as well as the detachment of many stakeholders from, and limited understanding of, the actual functioning of the manufacturing industry, Jordan’s trade regime and/or the SEZs in Jordan, also has caused considerable friction.
In the lead-up to the EU deal, some conflicts of interest became visible, for example in discussions about whether the new regulations should apply by factory, by zone, or across sectors and spaces. The GoJ and Jordanian business associations pushed for a deal that was as open as possible, creating access to the EU market in return for a certain percentage of Syrians being employed in a sector, zone, or in the country as a whole.64 Yet, in order to ensure adherence to the regulations could be monitored effectively, the EU negotiators insisted on making the new RoO applicable only by individual factory and only within SEZs,65 thereby reducing the number of firms that could readily take advantage of the rule changes. This also de facto means that improved accessibility to EU markets will be limited to companies that actually succeed in employing the required percentage of Syrian refugees.
Jordanian negotiators succeeded, however, in adding a substantial number of zones to the five government-run development zones for which the scheme originally was foreseen in
57 Cf. Anna L. Tsing (2005) Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press), p. 8.
58 See Erica Harper, Sean D. Thomas & Mays Abdel Aziz (2015) Forging New Strategies in Protracted Refugee Crises: Syrian Refugees and the Host State Economy (Amman: WANA Institute).
59 See Betts & Collier, Refuge, p. vii.
60 This prominently includes the current Minister of Planning, Imad Fakhoury, who has been heavily involved in the transition toward work permits for Syrians. He is not just a political heavyweight and confidante of the King, but also one of the politicians particularly associated with zonal development.
61 See Hanieh, Lineages, pp. 56–60.
62 See i.e., al-Khatib et al., Re-Thinking Investment, pp. 20–23. In the case of ASEZA, investment success has come at the expense of marginalizing much of the local population, so as to make way for potentially lucrative real estate projects; cf. Debruyne, Spatial Rearticulations, pp. 201–232.
63 See Toppen et al., Work Opportunities, pp. 20–26.
64 See JSF, Relaxing the Rules.
65 Author Interviews with Dina Khayyat, Chairperson of JGATE, Amman, May 2016; and an official in European Commission Directorate-General (EC D-G) for Neighbourhood and Enlargement Negotiations, via telephone, July 2017.
the Jordan Compact.66 Factories and sectors located in Jordan’s Industrial Estates, such as the garment sector that exports successfully to the US market, now—at least in theory—also can gain access to the European market. Many firms in Jordan, however, have long been unable to export to the EU because of the relatively stringent standards required of all goods entering the European single market, which this deal does nothing to tackle.67 The deal that was negotiated in effect has meant that only a very limited pool of companies potentially could benefit from it.
Perspectives not only have differed on the opportunities offered by the specific regulations, but also regarding the very nature of the anticipated investments. Rather than discussing the economic utility and feasibility of the scheme, public discussions often have framed future potential investments as a European duty, or, alternatively, as a gift that Jordan deserves.
To give just one example, an op-ed in the daily al-Ghad, echoing governmental statements, points out that given European governments’ fear of (more) Syrians taking refuge in their countries, it is their duty to create investments in Jordan, which can provide hundreds of thousands of jobs for Syrians and Jordanians.68 In such statements, investments appear not so much as driven by economic opportunity, but rather as a form of aid, which is assumed to be coming, if only you ask for it strongly enough. While this latter dynamic is a very well-established one in Jordan, particularly in times of crisis,69 actually attracting investments may not be so straightforward.
For those who are supposed actually to establish businesses in the designated areas, profit motives and calculations remain a central consideration. The possibilities of preferential access to EU markets, the inclusion of refugees in corporate social responsibility (CSR) strategies,70 as well as the waiving of fees for work permits plausibly could interest potential investors. Yet, factors like production and shipping costs, the quality of infrastructure and the transparency of regulations play a decisive role in these decisions as well, and Jordan fares relatively poorly on most of these fronts. Production costs remain comparatively high due to high costs of industrial inputs, especially fuel and electricity. Coupled with comparably low productivity levels among the local workforce, the costs hamper competitiveness with products from India, China or Turkey.71 In spite of a new investment law that is supposed to facilitate investment, Jordan’s rank in investment-related indices has deteriorated in recent
66 The deal includes the originally foreseen governmental Special Economic Zones as well as Industrial Estates (formerly QIZs), and a number of ‘Industrial Areas’ that do not have a designated status, but rather constitute sites or conglomerates of factories. The GoJ argued that these latter areas would be suitable for inclusion due to being characterized by low income levels, high unemployment, and a large number of Syrian residents. See Tariq al-Da’ja (2016) Suʿubat Tawajaha al-Mufawadat maʿa al-Ittihad al-Urubbi li-Tanfidh Mukharrajat London [Difficulties facing the negotiations with the EU for implementing the London outcomes], Al-Ghad, June 20. Available at:
www.al-ghad.com, accessed January 10, 2017; Author Telephone Interview with official in EC D-G for Neighbourhood and Enlargement Negotiations, July 2017.
67 Ibid, Author Telephone Interview; and JSF, Relaxing the Rules, p. 22.
68 Jumana Ghunaimat (2016) London bi-l-Arqam [London in figures], Al-Ghad, February 6. Available at:
www.al-ghad.com, accessed January 10, 2017; cf. Bethan Staton (2016) Jordan Experiment Spurs Jobs for Refugees, Refugees Deeply. Available at: https://www.newsdeeply.com/refugees, accessed January 10, 2017.
69 See Anne Peters & Pete Moore (2009) Beyond Boom and Bust: External Rents, Durable Authoritarianism, and Institutional Adaptation in the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, Studies in Comparative International Development, 44(3), pp. 256–285.
70 Betts & Collier, Refuge, point out that the current Western perception of a refugee crisis provides an opportune moment to push for such strategic political-economic reorientations, p. 172.
71 Author Interview with Ahmad Awad, Amman, May 2016.
years.72 While Jordan’s political stability may have been a factor in establishing factories in the QIZs in the 1990s and early 2000s,73 the Arab uprisings, the Syria conflict and the rise of Islamic State, as well as the closure of borders and trade routes since 2011, have changed prevailing perceptions of Jordan and the region more broadly, and may well deter many potential investors.
Given these obstacles, uptake has been slow. By May 2017, fewer than 10 companies had registered to export under the new RoO regulation, and only one actually had done so,74 a turnout that has resulted in a blame game among donors, the government and the private sector,75 but also in renewed efforts to find or mobilize potential candidates.76 Yet it is uncertain from which countries and sectors new investments conceivably could come in the future. While Syrian investors are among those expected to take advantage of the new regulations,77 many already have found other bases in the last five years and probably will be reluctant to relocate again.78 Large Western companies, despite being involved in initial dis- cussions surrounding the Compact, have not made the hoped-for investments, and Jordanian companies themselves are unlikely to fill in the gap. While they have suffered greatly from conflict and border closures in the region and are therefore looking for new markets, they often lack connections with potential buyers in the EU, and the knowledge about EU markets and product standards required for certification.79 Accordingly, there is currently hardly any local industry that actually would be ready or able to export to the EU market.
These unresolved difficulties are compounded by the fact that companies in the SEZs find it very difficult to recruit a sufficient number of (qualified) Syrians to fill the required quota,80 for reasons that are discussed below. Similar difficulties have plagued the attempts to use
72 al-Khatib et al., Re-Thinking Investment, pp.18–29.
73 A factory manager in one of the Private Industrial Parks highlighted the tax-free regulation for these zones, as well the fact that Jordan was more stable than Bangladesh—where much of the global garment industry is located—as points of attraction. Yet his company came to Jordan under the original QIZ agreement. Author Interview with management of Needlecraft for Clothing Industry, al-Dulayl Industrial Park, June 2016.
74 Author Interviews with MoL Syrian Refugees Department, Amman, April 2017, Amman, April 2017; and MoPIC PMU representatives, Amman, May 2017.
75 O. Razzaz (2016) Employment Challenges and EU RoO agreement, Jordan Times, December 5. Available at:
http://www.jordantimes.com, accessed January 10, 2017.
76 Author Interviews with MoL Syrian Refugees Department, Amman, April 2017; MoPIC PMU representa- tives, Amman, May 2017; and Kay Marwan Depolacky, Director of Investment at the Jordan Industrial Estates Company (JIEC), Amman, May 2017.
77 See World Bank (2016b) Jordan – Economic Opportunities for Jordanians and Syrian Refugees Program for Results Project. Available at: www.documents.worldbank.org, accessed January 10, 2017, pp. 62–63.
78 A large number of the Syrian factories currently present in Jordan have been located, since before 2011, in the Jordanian industrial city of Sahab, just outside Amman. These businesses are responsible for a substantial portion of the manufacturing work permits issued to Syrians after the introduction of the grace period, many of whom had already been employed there before informally: Author Interview with Maha Kattaa, ILO Response Coordinator to Syrian Refugee Crisis in Jordan, Amman, August 2016. They also make up a large proportion of those registered for exporting under the new RoO, meaning that they have the required percentage of Syrian employees: Author Interview with MoL Syrian Refugees Department, Amman, May 2017. But the climate for Syrian investors has deteriorated rather than improved since 2011, so it seems unlikely that many will come in addition: see Lenner, Blasts from the Past, pp. 22–23.
79 JSF, Relaxing the Rules; Author Interviews with Ahmad Awad, Amman, May 2016; MoPIC PMU represent- atives, May 2017; and MoL Syrian Refugees Department, Amman, April 2017.
80 Author Interviews with Mukhallad Omari, Secretary General of Jordan Investment Commission (JIC), Amman, May 2017 and Kay Marwan Depolacky, May 2017. See also Laila Azzeh (2016) After EU Deal, Factories Struggling to Hire Syrian Workers, JCI, Jordan Times, August 20. Available at: http://www.jordantimes.com, accessed January 10, 2017.
